Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday January 15, 2014 @11:30AM
from the will-no-one-think-about-cyberdog dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this quick bite from Info Q: "Oracle is seeking feedback from the Java community about what it should work on for the next version of Java EE, the popular and widely used enterprise framework. As well as standardizing APIs for PaaS and SaaS the vendor is looking at removing some legacy baggage including EJB 2.x remote and local client view (EJBObject, EJBLocalObject, EJBHome, and EJBLocalHome interfaces) and CORBA."

So is Slashdot not capable of having any kind of informative conversation about one of the most commercially popular and long-lived everyday programming languages, because "Oracle, LOL" and "Java applets suck"?

Popped in here hoping to see some insightful discussion about the future of Java, to help inform my possible decision as to whether or not to spend a lot of time and effort becoming a Java developer. So far, sadly disappointed. Nothing but Java and Oracle jokes as old as the hills.

Then again, this is Slashdot. I don't know why I was expecting any kind of mature conversation about Java.

No kidding. I'd like to see the sort of syntax sugar that would cut the length of my classes source in half by generating setters and getters (perhaps via annotations like project Lombok does). There are a few other things of this sort that would vastly reduce the amount of boilerplate code.

I've been programming in Java since it first came out, and I never had any particular problems with it, other than the fact that it's rather verbose. I've been thinking there must be a way to accomplish the same thing without so much boilerplate code. Then I discovered Scala [scala-lang.org] (which runs on the JVM and can easily integrate with existing Java libraries).

Mind you there are some things about Scala that are kinda weird, like so much optional syntax and type inferencing makes it sometimes hard to read. But I've been finding it a joy for new code I write, almost Java-like but much less verbose, plus you get the functional programming capabilities that Java lacks. Some of the library code that's out there is hard to understand because of the nature of the syntax, but after you study it a bit, it's not too bad.

Yeah, Java and MySQL has seen better times - both platforms have recieved similar criticisms with regards to patching security issues. I don't much care if the world stops using Java, but the MySQL situation breaks my heart. On to MariaDB.

I've been programming in Java since it first came out, and I never had any particular problems with it, other than the fact that it's rather verbose. I've been thinking there must be a way to accomplish the same thing without so much boilerplate code. Then I discovered Scala [scala-lang.org] (which runs on the JVM and can easily integrate with existing Java libraries).
Mind you there are some things about Scala that are kinda weird, like so much optional syntax and type inferencing makes it sometimes hard to read. But I've been finding it a joy for new code I write, almost Java-like but much less verbose, plus you get the functional programming capabilities that Java lacks. Some of the library code that's out there is hard to understand because of the nature of the syntax, but after you study it a bit, it's not too bad.

For those of us old enough to remember, Java is, in fact, the new COBOL. COBOL, like Java, was the language of choice for software engineers of a bygone era (the 1970's), and suffered from a similar verbosity, clumsy syntax, and prevalence of boiler-plate code (substitute copylibs for jars and you are halfway there). I wrote COBOL for a living for decades and never, ever, coded most of the mandatory code sections.

When I was engaged in my first enterprise level Java project (a JBoss app), I was amazed at the similarities between the two languages. Despite the fact that the syntax and structure are completely different we have the same slavish devotion to form and "correctness". Of course, most people alive and writing code now are completely unaware of this, having never encountered COBOL in an enterprise environment.

Not saying this is a bad thing. Just saying. COBOL was also more or less controlled by one company, and that company was IBM due to the IBM's complete dominance of the mainframe market.